Well, the chickens are back....roosting in our RV and getting ready to wander off into the AZ desert for a few months in a week or so.
We did a Princess 14 day cruise (our first cruise), from Los Angeles, down thru the Panama Canal, ending up in Ft. Lauderdale FL, with stops in Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Aruba beside the day long transit of the Canal.....WHAT a great trip it was! Then spent a few days in Miami before flying back to where our rig was parked in CA.
We both read historian, David McCullough's Path Between the Seas on the way down to the Canal, while transiting and afterward, which gave us an in depth appreciation for the truly stupendous engineering accomplishment it represents.
Although, our "carbon footprint" for 2011 probably gave us not only a lifetime high, but probably was more than our carbon footprint for the past twenty years.
The fee for the Coral Princess to transit the Canal (a process that takes about 9-10 hours), was $385,000. But the captain said that in case we thought that excessive, we should remember that it actually SAVED more than half a million dollars, because the ship would have burned an additional $800,000 worth of diesel fuel going the long way around South America. Which makes my head spin as I think of how much fuel was spent going the 5,000 miles we DID go.........
When I think that this particular ship makes this trip two times a month for at least half the year, and is only one of a large number of other cruise ships doing the same thing, surely we are doomed in the global warming department.....
SO......feeling guilty for being a part of such waste, but admitting that the trip was wonderful, the food was amazing (every morsel cooked from scratch, and 40 pastry chefs alone on the ship), and we really enjoyed it. My 70th birthday was so painless, since I was having such a great time, that I hardly noticed that I had sailed into my 70s......
Nice to be back......if any of you have the chance to go through the Panama Canal, you won't be disappointed. It really was an experience of a lifetime.
Although as I look at the huge number of threads unread.........will take me quite a while to catch up here on the Simple Living boards.......